Sin and the Control SystemJOHN V. MYERS

Why We Quote from the Mythologies of the New World

Since uniformitarian scholars do not believe in cataclysms and in the cosmic
origins of religions, they can seldom catch a religion at the precise moment
of its inception, but are forever condemned to begin their study at some
point far down the line, after the transmogrifications of time have
converted the object of their study into a veritable mishmash.

What they can do—and often in quite brilliant and thorough fashion—is to
trace its concepts, rites and motifs to some other religion, to some other
people, or to some other time. When they do this, however, they are not
really solving the problem of origin; they are merely demonstrating
how widespread the problem is.

To exclude—for everyone but the most rabid of diffusionists ­the possibility
of tracing the "origins" of the concepts we are discussing to the
Egyptians, or to the Canaanites, or to the Babylonians, or to the Sumerians,
we will give examples of them not only from the literatures of the Biblical
world and the Greek world, but from that of the New World as well.

The Garden of Eden and the Destruction of the Golden Age

What did our ancestors believe had been the cause of these periodic cosmic
catastrophes which we maintain were the starting points for many of the
world's religions? Here we paraphrase some remarks of Velikovsky made
during the course of a lecture at Columbia University:

So what was the reaction of man to these experiences? He felt guilty.
This was his only hope. He—or his ancestors—had committed some
sin. Now, if he were to change, maybe there would be some
hope for his future.

And so we see repeatedly that after each catastrophe the survivors look for
a new set of rules to follow. By doing this, they would become
different, and there would be hope for their future.

Velikovsky is clearly implying that our ancestors believed that it was
through their incorrect behavior that they had brought the
catastrophes upon themselves. Is there any scriptural evidence to support
this contention of Velikovsky?

Genesis 2-3 passim: The Lord God took the man and put him in the
garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man,
saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you
eat of it you shall die.". . .

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it
was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to
make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some
to her husband, and he ate ....

But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, . . Have you
eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"

The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me
fruit of the tree, and I ate."

Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you have
done?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.". . .

Then the Lord God . . . sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to
till the ground from which he was taken.

He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he
placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to
guard the way to the tree of life.

There are five elements in this passage which lead us to the
conclusion that the garden of Eden—that is, the Golden Age—was destroyed by cosmic catastrophe:

The first is the sudden change of the climate from benign to harsh.

The second is that the people were driven into migration, a
phenomenon normally associated with cataclysm.

The third is the presence of the cherubim. Cherubim are
angels, and angels were originally personified celestial prodigies.
/Cf. WIC, "The Archangels."

The fourth is the sudden replacement of innocence by sin and guilt.
This cataclysmic mutation of the psyche must have been provoked by a
correspondingly cataclysmic mutation of the physical environment.

The fifth is the nature of what Adam and Eve learned when they ate
of the tree. They learned of the existence of good and evil—that
is, they learned the true nature of the universe, that it is
sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent. In religious terms,
they learned that the same God who walked and talked with Adam in
the cool of the evening could become—in one unpredictable moment—an angry and evil monster bent on the total destruction of his
own creation.

Thus, for one brief instant, our ancestors—like Job—looked upon
the Face of God. And like Job, they recoiled from the
horror of what they had seen. The realization that the power that
held them in the palm of its hand was evil was too painful to
bear. It was less painful to take the evil upon
themselves, and to believe that it was because of their
evil that they were being punished by a righteous God. Only
in this way could there be any hope of controlling a capricious and
brutal universe, for now they could escape the wrath of God by doing
what was right in His eyes.

It was at this moment—when our ancestors flinched in the face of
reality and took upon themselves the evil of God—that sin and
guilt were born, and religion came into existence.

Even so, the burden was great, and someday God would have to take it
back upon himself, where it rightly belonged.

Thus we see that the Bible tells the old story backward. Adam and
Eve were not driven out of Eden because they had sinned; they
assumed that they had sinned because they had been driven out.

Since the story of a Golden Age appears in widely scattered regions
of the globe, there must have been at one time an extremely broad
bank of benign climate with little seasonal variation. As
Velikovsky has suggested somewhere, this effect could have been
produced by an extremely vertical position of the earth's axis.

The Deluge

Genesis 6.11, 13; 7. I: Now the earth was corrupt in God's
sight, and the earth was filled with violence.

And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all
flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I
will destroy them with the earth."

Then the Lord said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and all your
household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this
generation."

The cause of the deluge was the sin of violence. The only
survivors were the righteous Noah and his family. Thus has the
collective amnesia shifted the consequences of catastrophe to the
sinful, and spared the righteous.

It is precisely here—in the near annihilation of the human race
by cosmic catastrophe—that we have the Origins of salvation
for the righteous, and the remnant of the redeemed.

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

Genesis 19 passim.. Then the Lord rained on Sodom and
Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he
overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants
of the cities, and what grew on the ground....

So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God
remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow,
when he overthrew the cities in which Lot dwelt.

To discover the reason that Abraham and his people were spared, we
turn back to Genesis 18. Here we read that when the Lord and his
two angels visited Abraham and Sarah by the oaks of Mamre, the were
greeted with hospitality. In Genesis 19, we read that when
the two angels of destruction (those celestial prodigies again:)
visited Lot and his family in Sodom, they were again received with
hospitality. The Sodomites, on the other hand, were extremely
inhospitable. Salvation, therefore, was the reward for granting
hospitality to strangers. We will return to this theme of
hospitality when we examine Jesus' description of the Last Judgment.

In these passages we have an excellent example of one of the
favorite devices of the collective amnesia—converting the
cataclysmic approaches of heavenly bodies into friendly visits by
the gods to the "good” people. (If this seems a little startling,
the reader should remember that cataclysms tend to be interpreted by
their survivors, not by their victims.)

Baucis and Philemon

Long, long ago, Jove in his mortal dress
Came to this country with his lively son -
The one who stemmed from Atlas, a brisk boy
Who'd dropped his wings but held a magic wand

They knocked for shelter at a thousand homes
And learned a thousand gates were locked against them.
At last a cottage roofed with straw and grass
Swung its doors wide. Within these shabby walls

Old Baucis and wife Philemon survived.
Equal in age, both pious and reserved.

[The old couple make Jove and Hermes (Jupiter and Mercury) welcome,
and prepare them a humble meal of bacon, olives, cherries, wine,
lettuce, cottage cheese, radishes, and baked eggs.

When the wine bowl becomes empty, it fills again by magic. This
reveals to the old couple that their guests are no ordinary
mortals. Determined to offer them a more fitting repast, they
attempt to chase down their old "watch-dog" goose, but it takes
refuge in Jove's lap.]

'Don't murder the poor goose; we're gods on earth,'
The two gods cried. 'This un-god-fearing country
Shall be condemned, but you, my dears, shall not;
Leave home at once, and we'll climb up the mountain.'

Staggering on crutches Baucis, Philemon
Took the long path uphill, and when they'd reached
An arrow's flight from where the top loomed high,
They turned to see the land they'd left below them:

Again that weird pinpoint accuracy of the cataclysm in picking off
the wicked and sparing the innocent. Again, salvation through
hospitality. Again the cataclysmic approaches of heavenly bodies
converted into friendly visits by the gods to the "good" people.

Vucub-Caquix and the Destruction of the Men of Wood

Popol Vuh 1.3: Immediately the wooden figures were
annihilated, destroyed, broken up, and killed . . . those that they
had made, that they had created, did not think, did not speak with
their Creator, their Maker. And for this reason they were killed,
they were deluged. A heavy resin fell from the sky....

This was to punish them because they had not thought of their
mother, nor their father, the Heart of Heaven, called Huracan. And
for this reason the face of the earth was darkened and a black rain
began to fall, by day and by night....

1.4: It was cloudy and twilight then on the face of the earth.
There was no sun yet. Nevertheless, there was a being called
Vucub-Caquix who was very proud of himself.

The sky and the earth existed, but the faces of the sun and the moon
were covered.

And he [Vucub-Caquix] said: I shall now be great above all the
beings created and formed. I am the sun, the light, the moon," he
exclaimed. "Great is my splendor. Because of me men shall walk and
conquer. For my eyes are ... bright ... ; my teeth shine like
precious stones .... My nose shines afar like the moon, my throne is
of silver, and the face of the earth is lighted when I pass before
my throne.

"So, then, I am the sun, I am the moon, for all mankind. So shall
it be, because I can see very far.". . .

And all this happened when the flood came because of the wooden people.

Here we have—separated by eight thousand miles and an ocean from
the land of the Bible—the same concept of destruction because of
sin, and the same operation of the collective amnesia in shifting
the consequences of catastrophe to other people—from the
righteous "men of maize" to the sinful and half-human "men of
wood."

How can this be? For the simple reason that the New World and the
Old World had two important things in common in the year of 1500
B.C.—the cataclysmic visit of the Venus-comet and the response of
the human mind to it.

The "resin" which fell from the sky is, of course, the sticky
bitumen which precipitated from the clouds in which Venus enveloped
the earth. This bitumen was the prototype of the aromatic gums and
resins which the American Indians burn unto their gods to this very day.

Vucub-Caquix is the brilliant head of the comet—the
demonic agent of the destruction and one of the American
counterparts of the Canaanitic Helel, prototype of Isaiah's Lucifer.

The Plague of Thebes and the Black Death

Oedipus: O children, last born stock of ancient Cadmus,
What petitions are
these you bring to me
With garlands on your
suppliant olive branches?
The whole city teems
with incense fumes,
Teems with prayers
for healing and with groans....

Priest: O Oedipus, ruler of my land, you see
How old we are who
stand in supplication ....
The rest of the tribe
sits with wreathed branches,
In market places, at
Pallas' two temples,
And at prophetic
embers by the river.

The city, as you see,
now shakes too greatly
And cannot raise her
head out of the depths
Above the gory
swell. She wastes in blight,
Blight on earth's
fruitful blooms and grazing flocks,

And on the barren birth pangs of the women.
The fever god has fallen on the city,
And drives it, a most hated pestilence
Through whom the home
of Cadmus is made empty.
Black Hades is
enriched with wails and groans....

Creon: May I tell you what I heard from the god?
Lord Phoebus clearly bids us to drive out,
And not to leave
uncured within this country,
A pollution we have nourished in our land.

Oedipus: With what purgation? What kind of misfortune?

Creon: Banish the man, or quit slaughter with slaughter
In cleansing, since
this blood rains on the state.

Note the reversal of
the situation described in previous citations. We are not dealing
here with a cosmic catastrophe but with a terres­trial one, and it
is the victims of the disaster who are interpreting events.
No longer is it the great mass of mankind which has sinned and been
destroyed by the catastrophe thus provoked while the righteous
remnant survives. Here the collective is obeying every rule of the
control system, and its administrators—the priests—are working
overtime. Yet the plague continues and the collective is being
punished for the sins of one man.

Thus sin has become
individualized, and it consists in breaking the rules of the
control system and thereby subjecting the collective to the anger of
the gods and to disaster.

But the Oedipus Rex is literature, and the oracle has—with admirable nicety—pointed out the one man responsible for the plague.
Let us now take a peek at grim reality:

During the fourteenth century, in Europe alone, twenty-five million
persons perished .... During epidemics of the plague the medieval
cities were in an indescribably horrible condition. The dead and
dying blocked the streets. . . . Among the dying multitudes there
were scenes of courage, devotion, and self-sacrifice .... There were
scenes, too, of the most despicable brutality as the people sought
to find an escape in their panic by the torture and execution of the
Jews. . . . They were accused of causing the plague by poisoning the
wells. In some places they were systematically murdered or driven
to their death by persecution. In Mayence 12,000 threw themselves
into fires kindled to bum them.

It is not obvious
that the ostensible reason for the execution of the Jews is merely a
camouflaging of the real reason? The Jews have brought this
disaster upon the collective by their refusal to subscribe to the
gods, premises, and rules of the prevailing control system. And
herein lies the origin of the witchhunt and the pogrom.

The Man who Picked up Sticks on the Sabbath

Numbers
15.32-36: While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they
found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. And those who
found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to
all the congre­gation. They put him in custody, because it had not
been made plain what should be done to him. And the Lord said to
Moses, "The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall
stone him with stones outside the camp." And all the congregation
brought him outside the camp, and stoned him to death with stones,
as the Lord commanded Moses.

It is passages such
as this that constitute one of the primary scriptural sources of
anti-Semitism. But the summary treatment accorded this poor fellow
was not a manifestation of some peculiar defect in the character of
the ancient Israelites. Like Oedipus, he had broken the rules of
the control system, and was thereby placing the entire collective in
imminent danger of catastrophe.

Note that the
collective did not know automatically what the penalty for this act
should be. This implies an imperfect state of the control system in
that not all the rules and penalties had yet been codified. Thus
the code was an expanding structure, reacting constantly to the
blows of harsh reality and to the desire to cover all possible ways
of displeasing God. The reader has only to leaf through the
Pentateuch to catch a glimpse of the elaborateness which the rules
of the control system were ultimately to attain.

It is clear that the
offender did not know the penalty for his sin. Since no one thought
to ask him, it is not even clear that he knew he had sinned. Would
it have made any difference if he had not known? Probably not.
Remember that Oedipus did not know that he had killed his father and
slept with his mother. Besides, "ignorance of the law is no
excuse."

The Contract and the Coming of the Priesthood

The founding charter
of the control system is a contract between the collective and the
universe—or rather between the collective and the god or gods into
which it has personified the universe. In the case of the
Israelites, fortunately, it was a written contract of which a copy
is still extant:

Exodus 15.25-26: There the Lord made for them a statute and
an ordinance and there he proved them, saying, "If you will
diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that
which is right in his eyes, and give heed to his commandments and
keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon you
which I put upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord, your healer."

But who is to
determine what "right" is and what God's command­ments and statutes
are, and what constitutes their proper observance? The experts,
of course—the members of the priesthood.

And it is here—in
its role as administrator of the control system ­that we have the
origin of the power of the priesthood.

Why the Sinner Must be Punished

But if God is just
and righteous, then why—as in the case of a plague, for example—
must the innocent collective suffer for the sins of one man, or
even for those of the strangers within the gates?

For answer, we will
not turn to the uniformitarian psychiatrists, scholars and
theologians. They have imbibed far too freely of the waters of
Lethe to be of any help to us here. Let us go back twenty-four
hundred years and question the ancient Greeks on the matter:

Creon: May I
tell you what I heard from the god?

Lord Phoebus clearly
bids us to drive out,
And not to leave
uncured within this country,A pollution we
have nourished in our land.

Oedipus: With what purgation? What kind of misfor­tune?

Creon: Banish the man, or quit slaughter with slaughter In
cleansing, since this blood rains on the state.

It appears, then,
that the collective is not innocent after all. It has been
"nourishing" a "pollution" in its midst. The logic is inexorable.
Unless the collective takes the evil upon itself—just as Adam and
Eve did—it remains with God. He is then seen to be capricious and
brutal, and there is no longer any hope of controlling him. And
this is precisely what the collective cannot face.

It also appears that
God—being just—wants the punishment to match the crime—"slaughter" for "slaughter." Thus when in time of calamity the
collective butchers the strangers in its midst, it is carrying out
the will of God.

It is enough to chill the marrow of the bones, but there it is.

________________________________________

Equally instructive
is an analogous situation that occurs in the body of science. The
world view of modern science—that is, of uniformitarian
science—is that the universe operates in accord with laws of its
own. These laws can be detected and formulated and, through their
application to nature in the form of technology, the human race can
make infinite progress in a stable and orderly solar system.

The premises of
science are only partially false. It can, indeed, ensure a relative
degree of control over terrestrial forces, but since a cosmic
catastrophe occurred less than three thousand years ago, it cannot,
despite all its claims to the contrary, assure us that the solar
system will remain as stable in the future as it is at the present time.

One of the primary
responsibilities of science is to examine reality and report its
findings to the collective. When—with the adoption in the last
century of the false dogma of uniformitarianism—science ceased
doing this, it ceased being true science and the scientists ceased
being true scientists. We will explore elsewhere the reasons for
this abnegation of responsibility.

Nevertheless, like
other control systems, science does supply the collective with the
illusion of control.

Once a control system
is established in a literate collective, its administrative
personnel—to the extent possible and considered necessary—proceed to rewrite the history of the collective to bring it into
harmony with the premises of the control system.

Modern Science Rewrites History

Since one of the
major premises of the control system operated by modern science is
fallacious, its administrators are under a terrible compulsion to
rewrite history to make it accord with their false dogma. This
dogma states that the solar system was stabilized into its present
order long before the advent of man, and that, therefore, no cosmic
catastrophes can have occurred to the human race. It states further
that the heavenly bodies are so neatly separated by Newton's laws
that no such catastrophe is likely to occur in the foreseeable
future. The astronomers readily admit that one will occur four
billion years from now when the sun enters a new phase of its
evolution, but they have no fear that this prospect will shake the
faith of the people in their declaration that the universe is
essentially benevolent.

Now, it so happens
that one of the most convincing pieces of evidence that Velikovsky
has presented to show that Venus has not always been in her present
orbit is the so-called "Venus tablets of Ammizaduga." These tablets
present a series of Babylonian observations of the movements of
Venus which are not at all in accord with her present movement.

How does the reader
suppose that the astronomers and scholars have reacted to these
tablets? Were they, perchance, moved by their respect for
Babylonian astronomy to undertake an "agonizing reappraisal" of
their precious uniformitarian dogma? Let us see just how they did
react:

"The period between the heliacal setting of Venus and its rise is 72
days. But in the Babylonian-Assyrian astrological texts, the
period varies from one month to five months—too long and too
short: the observations were defective.". . .

"The impossible interval shows that the data are not trustworthy."

"Obviously, the days of the month have been mixed up. As the
impossible intervals show, the months are also wrong." /WIC, "Venus
Moves Irregularly."/

But this is not
precisely rewriting history. This is more on the order of
calling the Babylonian astronomers stupid. Let us now look
at an actual attempt to rewrite the Venus tablets:

.
. . The compiler or copyist has in the numbers of the months taken
for m last one unit too little (I instead of II) and has
added this quantity to the number of the month of e first (IV
instead of V). By a similar error he has taken two tens too little
in the number of the day for m last, and has added these to
e first. Afterwards he has found the difference between the
false dates of the two phenomena: an interval of five months sixteen
days instead of the correct difference, two months six days. The
observation, thus restored, is excellent and with Ammizaduga 5 the
best at superior conjunction. (From The Venus Tablets of
Ammizaduga, S. Langdon, and J. K. Fotheringham, Oxford, 1928,
pp. 105-106.)

/ Cited in Pensee
V (Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 1973), p. 38. /

Now let us read the
comments of Professor Lynn E. Rose upon this remarkable performance:

Note the ease with which LFS [ Langdon, Fotheringham, Schoch] can
take away a month here, add a month there, take away 20 days here,
and add 20 days there, all for the sake of reconciling the text with
modem observations of what Venus appears to be doing. This is what
I called playing the uniformitarian game. They don't want any five
month invisibilities, so, when the ancient texts report one, they
rewrite those texts so that it isn't there anymore and so that what
is there will be in accord with modem observations. Then, after
the surgery has been completed, they find, to no one's surprise,
that "the observation, thus restored, is excellent."

/ Ibid., pp. 39-40. /

But such acts of
mathematical legerdemain are far from consti­tuting the principal
way in which uniformitarian science rewrites history.

If there is one thing
above all others that we would like the reader to learn from this
essay, it is that our sacred texts, our mythologies, and our
folklores—as transmuted by the collective amnesia as they may be—contain the pre-scientific history of the human race.

Now, uniformitarian
science does not really go to the trouble of actually rewriting all
this history. With all the weight of its enormous prestige behind
its pronouncement, it simply declares that the stories we find in
religious texts, mythologies and folklores are little more than the
confused but charming product of the primitive and childlike minds
of our ancient ancestors who were obviously incapable of making
accurate observations of the phenomena of nature.

In other words,
science simply pronounces the ancient history of the human race to be
non-history. In this way, the control system is then made more
secure; and hence we can see the psychological roots of the resistance
of both orthodox religion and science to Velikovsky's dredging up of
buried memories.

The Extension of the Control System

The need for the control
system was created by cosmic catastrophe. Now, if the coverage of the
system had been restricted to the staving off of cosmic catastrophe, it
would have fared very well at the hands of its confrontations with
reality. Each near miss of Venus, or of Mars, or of a comet would have
supplied overwhelming proof of the efficacy of the system. And even
when disaster did strike, the administrators would have found it
relatively easy to "prove" that somebody had broken one or more of the
rules. (Indeed, perhaps we have here one of the very reasons for
constantly adding to these miles.) Further, when the disaster had
finally run its course—as it always did—the control system could
then take credit for having brought about this fervently desired result.

Unfortunately, however,
the coverage of the system was extended to terrestrial calamities—
both major and minor—to war, famine, plague, locusts, leprosy, and
even the welfare of the Jewish state. The logic behind this extension
was straightforward enough. The God who had destroyed the crops of
Egypt could turn out some bounteous harvests—if he so desired. The
God who had drowned the Egyptian army could surely protect his chosen
people from the Amalekites, and the Canaanites, and the Edomites, and
the Moabites, and the Ammonites, and the Philistines, and even from the
mighty hordes of Assyria and Babylon. The God who had put his people
through the tortures of the damned to bring them at last into their
Promised Land would surely not allow them to be hauled away into
captivity by their enemies—unless, of course, they were to commit
some sin of such enormity as to deserve it.

As a result of this
overextension, the control system will actually fare rather poorly in
its daily confrontations with reality, for it will eventually become
apparent to all but the most obtuse—and, naturally, to the holders of
office in the system—that the thing is not really working very well
at all.

Thus disillusionment sets
in, and perspicacious and bold individuals—voicing the general
malaise of the people—will stand up and challenge the very premises
of the system.

As to some of the
manifestations of this disillusionment, and the careers of some of the
challengers—that is another story.